Primarily, insights into my learning on a Masters distance course with the University of Nottingham.
Three weeks have passed and we have come to the end of my first short online course in creative writing. It was a pleasure and honour to support 4 willing participants shake off their inhibitions, adopt a positive mindset and get down to some serious writing! About the Course The fundamentals of the course were…
Call For Participants This is a call for participants to my online collaborative exchange project. This ‘Telecollaboration‘ will be carried out as academic research for my Masters in Digital Technologies for Language Teaching at the University of Nottingham. Please read the dissertation abstract here. Or read the full dissertation proposal here. What is Telecollaboration? Telecollaboration…
Reflection on: Building Sense of Community at a Distance by Alfred Rovai (2002) International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 3, No. 1. Issues in Online Learning This paper discusses how best to design and conduct an online course in response to the major issues in distance learning: high dropout rates – apparently 10-20%…
Reflection on: Using SmallWorlds to enhance social presence, group cohesion, and group identity in an online postgraduate course by Angelos Konstantinidis (2017) Overview This paper about virtual worlds reminds us that the current digitised and connected world is forcing educators to re-think the way in which they teach. On second thought, ‘force’ is a strong…
Here is a 10 slide, 10 minute presentation introducing the concept of Telecollaboration for EFL Talks 10 in 10 Terms. EFL Talks is a great place for educational professionals to learn from each other – essentially teachers teaching teachers! Want to know what it’s like to organise a telecollaboration? Listen to an interview with Eva…
Reflection on: Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions, Garrison, R.D., & Arbaugh, J.B., The Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 157-172 Overview This paper provides a summary to date (well, up to 2007) of the research made about the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) and…
Reflection on: Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster “epistemic engagement” and “cognitive presence” in online education (Shea & Bidjerano, 2009) How to improve cognitive presence in online education This study of 2000 online learners by Shea & Bidjerano (2009) confirms the constructs of teaching, social and cognitive presence as theorised by the…
Reflection on: Exploring casual relationships among teaching, cognitive and social presence: Student perceptions of the community of inquiry framework by Garrison et. al (2009) Teaching Presence in Online Learning This paper discusses the need to have a holistic framework to facilitate the integration of pedagogy and technology. The Community of Inquiry (Garrison, Anderson & Archer,…
Participation is the ways in which individuals engage in activity: “We have observed that the early appearance of one or more participants performing social behaviours will impact on the longer-term development of a supportive culture for the life of the community” (Galley et. al, 2012, p10). The instructor is the main, active moderator in an…
Definition of Community Galley et al. (2012) highlight an evolution in the notion of ‘community’ from Networks of Practice (Wenger, 1998; and Brown & Duguid, 2001) , and Network Sociality (Wittel, 2001) to Community of Inquiry (Garrison et al., 2000) and Communities of Interest (Fischer, 2002). According to Smith (2001) early definitions of term community centre around place, as in physical location,…